CHAPTER 6 #2
I thought, the new wife is up at the pump.
*
I walked back across the basin.
The east had gone gray. The lodgepole behind me was a long black against a long gray. The dooryard was the color of pewter.
I came around the corner of the cabin's east wall.
Willa was at the iron pump.
She had not slept; I could see that. She was in the green-and-cream travel dress she had stepped down from the wagon in five evenings ago, the dress with the mended collar her mother had set the lavender into, and the fabric had taken the night the way a fabric takes a night when it has been worn through with no second dress to change into. The hem was dusted.
Her hair was pinned with the bone pin at the nape — a small low coil, the bone of the pin showing through the dark blonde where she had not got the coil all the way around it on the first try. A clean tin pail stood at her feet.
She did not see me.
I stood at six feet from the pump's stone trough behind the corner of the cabin's east wall and watched.
She pumped.
The first stroke came slow. She did not pump with both hands.
She pumped with the right hand alone, and she set her left hand on her own hip at the small of her back, the way a tailor's daughter would brace a back that had stood at a cutting-table since she was eight.
The catch of her sleeve at her elbow held a small thread loose where she had mended the cuff in St. Louis.
The pump took a third stroke and the water came; it ran out of the iron spout in a clear thread and went down in the pail and the pail rang once, soft.
She stopped after the pail was full. She did not lift it right away.
She set her right hand flat on the iron of the pump-handle the way I had set my right hand flat on the cross-bar at the lodgepole, and she left it there.
She breathed once. She lifted her hand off.
She wiped her palm down the side of her skirt. She bent for the pail.
I thought it to Eliza, low in my chest, darlin', this one pumps with one hand.
You used to pump with both. You said the basin's lever took two hands and I said, no, my own took only one.
You laughed at the difference between us.
This one pumps with one. The wrist was made by a sewing-machine treadle at eight years old and a tailor's bench at sixteen.
I did not say darlin' to Willa. I had said it to Eliza at the cross-bar a quarter-hour ago and now in my chest in the dooryard, and that was the count I was holding.
The bone pin had slipped a half-quarter-inch.
I watched her right hand go up and set the pin without looking — the careful press of the right thumb against the pin's head, the bone catching the dark blonde, the pin laid back down at the same angle it had been in when she had stepped down from the wagon. She did not need a mirror.
I stepped out from the corner of the cabin's east wall.
*
I said, "Mrs. Greer."
She turned. She did not startle. She said, "Mr. Halloran."
I said, "May I help you with the pail."
She said, "I have it."
She had it. The pail was full to a half-inch below the rim. She set it carefully on the flagstone at the pump's base.
I nodded.
I thought, I am closer than I should be.
I stepped back to six feet.
She did not remark on it. She set a second clean tin pail at her feet and put her hand on the lever again. She pumped a second pail. The pump yielded water on the second stroke; the iron had warmed. The pail filled.
I inclined my head. I went past her at six feet — keeping the six feet honest — and crossed the dooryard to the freight stable.
*
I sat down on the wooden crate by the harness rack with the lead-mule's collar on my knee.
I had a routine for harnessing in the dark. I had had it for nine years. I had run it on the Trinidad road in the November of '76 with a fever of a hundred and four. I had run it on the morning of the eighth of February in '77 with Beck at my elbow and the box in the wagon-bed.
I sat with the collar on my knee. I could not harness.
I had worked the freight road with this team forty times and I could not remember which strap went through which buckle.
The collar was the lead-mule's — the leather dark on the inside from the off-side wear, that was Brindle's — but the buckle was a buckle and the strap was a strap and the geometry between the two had gone out of my hands.
I laughed once. A small laugh, low, the sound of a man who has caught himself out at his own table.
I closed my eyes for a long beat.
I said, low, "Ach. Halloran."
I sat with the collar on my knee for the better part of a quarter-hour. The harness brass caught the gray through the gable window.
I got up. I put the collar back on the rack.
I crossed the dooryard. I did not look at the iron pump as I passed. I did not look at the cabin's kitchen window. I climbed the outside stair on the east gable of the freight stable. I closed the loft door behind me.
*
I sat on the edge of the rope-bed.
The spectacles on the windowsill held the morning light at the wire frame, the dust-rim catching the gray of the east. The stone beside them held no light; it took light the way slate takes water, into itself.
The brown-and-rust wild-goose-chase quilt Eliza had pieced was folded across the foot of the bed.
The wider rope-bed had not had a woman in it since the third of February in '77.
I thought, I have not lain with a woman since you, Eliza. I do not know that I want to. I am afraid I will. I am afraid I will not.
I said it inside.
I said it outside, half-aloud, to the empty room: "Ach. Halloran. You are a fool of a man and a worse husband to the dead."
The room held the sentence.
I lay back on the rope-bed.
I did not lie down to sleep. I lay down because the bed was the place I had been before I had gone out, and I had not yet decided where else to be. My boots were on. My coat was on, unweighted now that the stone was at the windowsill. My right hand was flat on my own chest at the sternum.
I did not sleep.
The spectacles held the gray. The dust-rim was the year and a half since Eliza had died — eight hundred and twenty-eight days by the count I kept against my own breastbone — and I had not touched them since the funeral except to lift them from the trunk to the windowsill the week the wagon had come up the freight road.
The dust was the days. The days had laid themselves on the wire frame the way the days had laid themselves on me.
The hand was mine and I had not yet asked it to lift them off.
I thought, Eliza. I am not lifting you off. I am letting the sun come through you. That is the most I can ask of myself by Sunday morning.
I thought, Halloran. You are still a fool.
The iron pump in the dooryard squeaked again — Beck's hand, three strokes from the shoulder, the lever rising-and-falling without pause.
I thought Willa's name once.
I did not say it.
I closed my eyes.